Bank of America and Wells Fargo gouging - Jerry Brown should step in

California Attorney General Jerry Brown should look into this. According to The Associated Press via The Huffington Post, Wells Fargo was ordered to pay $205 million to its customers as part of a successful class-action lawsuit.

What Wells Fargo was doing was allowing debit purchases to go through when a customer's account was overdrawn. But Bank of America has the same practice, and this blogger experienced it after a client bounced a check.

What Bank of America does is pile on one payment when you're overdrawn, thus triggering another overdraft charge and making more money from it. Then, when the non-paid vendor tries to collect again, the Bank of America issues a second overdraft charge!

My sources in and out of Bank of America have confirmed this problem. In other words, Bank of America has practiced the same process Wells Fargo was accused of and is now ordered to pay its customers back to settle.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup accused Wells Fargo of profiteering

According to the AP, U.S. District Judge William Alsup, who's in the Northern District Court of California in San Francisco, accused Wells Fargo of profiteering, specifically "Internal bank memos and e-mails leave no doubt that, overdraft revenue being a big profit center, the bank's dominant, indeed sole, motive was to maximize the number of overdrafts."

In this blogger's experience with his Bank of America account, there were as many as not one, but three overdraft penalties drawn in one day, and four in two days, separated by the weekend, from two vendors!

What should happen is simple: one overdraft penalty for one charge unpaid. That's it. Bank of America should be the focus of California Attorney General Jerry Brown's gaze, and sooner rather than later.